Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina

The history of lead contamination in New Orleans is fascinating beyond its context as the source of Mel Chin's activist artwork. Several weeks ago, before I talked with Chin, I picked up Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina by Robert Bullard and Beverly Wright. The book offers, among other things, an account of the number of governmental organizations that did not and do not want to deal with the staggering problem of soil contamination in New Orleans—a crisis that predates Hurricane Katrina but, like so many problems in the city, was exacerbated by the storm.

Because I have missed you, and because this is context worth having (and information worth sharing), I am painstakingly retyping a section of the book for you here. (And painstaking it is! I spilled miso soup on my keyboard a couple weeks back. I now enjoy the luxury of the

" ' P - 0 p : ) ; [arrow]

keys through the laborious combination of keyboard remapping and perpetual cut-and-pasting.)

Anyhow, this excerpt is long but worth the read. It comes from a passage on issues facing the returning New Orleans diaspora:

Although government officials insist that the dirt in residents' yards is safe, Churchill Downs, Inc., the owners of New Orleans Fair Grounds, felt it was not safe for its million-dollar thoroughbred horses to race on. The Fair Grounds is the nations third oldest track. Only Saratoga and Pimlico have been racing longer. The owners hauled off soil tainted by Katrina's floodwaters and rebuilt a grandstand roof ripped off by the storm's wind (Martell 2006). The Fair Grounds opened on Thanksgiving Day 2006. If tainted soil is not safe for horses, surely it is not safe for people--especially children who play and dig in the dirt.

Families who chose to return to rebuild their communities shouldn't have to worry about their children playing in yards, parks, and schoolyards contaminated with cancer causing chemicals left by Katrina floodwaters. In March 2006, seven months after the storm slammed ashore, organizers of A Safe Way Back Home initiative, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University (DSCEJ), and the United Steelworkers (USW) undertook a proactive pilot neighborhood clean-up project--the first of its kind in New Orleans (Deep South Center for Environmental Justice 2006). The clean-up project, located in the 8100 block of Aberdeen Road in New Orleans East, removed several inches of tainted soil from the front and back yards, replacing the soil with new sod, and safely disposed of the contaminated dirt.

But residents who choose to remove the topsoil from their yards--which contains sediments left by flooding--find themselves in a Catch-22 situation with the Louisiana Department of Economic Quality and EPA insisting that the soil in their yards is not contaminated and the local landfill operators refusing to dispose of the soil because they suspect it is contaminated. This bottleneck of what to do with the topsoil remains unresolved more than three years after the flood.

The Safe Way Back Home demonstration project serves as a catalyst for a series of activities that will attempt to reclaim New Orleans East after Katrina. It is the governments responsibility to provide the resources required to address areas of environmental concern and to ensure that the workforce is protected. However, residents are not waiting for the government to ride in on a white horse to rescue them and clean up their neighborhoods.

The DSCEJ/USW coalition received dozens of requests and inquiries from New Orleans East homeowners associations to help clean up their neighborhoods block by block. State and federal officials called these voluntary cleanup efforts "scaremongering " (Simmons 2006). EPA and LDEQ officials said that they tested soil samples from the neighborhood in December 2006 and that there was no immediate cause for concern.

According to Tom Harris, administrator of LDEQ's environmental technology division and the state toxicologist, the government originally sampled 800 locations in New Orleans and found cause for concern in only 46 samples. Generally, the soil in New Orleans is consistent with "what we saw before Katrina, " says Harris. He called the Safe Way Back Home program "completely unnecessary" (Williams 2006). A week after the voluntary cleanup project began, an LDEQ staffer ate a spoonful of dirt scraped from the Aberdeen Road pilot project. The dirt eating publicity stunt was clearly an attempt to disparage the proactive neighborhood cleanup initiative. LDEQ officials later apologized.

[ . . . ]

Although many government scientists insisted that the soil is safe, an April 2006 multiagency task force press release distributed by EPA raised some questions (U.S. EPA 2006). Though it claimed that the levels of lead and other contaminants in New Orleans soil were "similar " to soil contaminant levels in other cities, it also cautioned residents to "keep children from playing in bare dirt. Cover bare dirt with grass, bushes, or 4 to 6 inches of lead-free wood chips, mulch, soil, or sand."

[ . . . ]

Now, instead of cleaning up the mess that existed before the storm, government officials are allowing dirty neighborhoods to stay dirty forever. Just because lead and other heavy metals existed in some New Orleans neighborhoods before Katrina doesn't mean that there isn't a moral or legal obligation to remediate any contamination uncovered. Government scientists have assured New Orleanians, including gardeners, that they do not need to worry about soil salinity and heavy metal content. They also say residents need not worry about digging or planting in the soil. But given the uncertainties built into quantitative risk assessments, how certain are these government officials that all of New Orleans neighborhoods are safe?

In August 2006, nearly a year after Katrina struck, the EPA gave New Orleans and surrounding communities a clean bill of health, while pledging to monitor a handful of toxic hot spots (Brown 2006). EPA and LDEQ officials concluded that Katrina did not cause any appreciable contamination that was not already there. Although EPA tests confirmed widespread lead in the soil--a pre-storm problem in 40 percent of New Orleans--EPA dismissed residents calls to address this problem as outside the agency's mission.

And in June 2007, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report, Hurricane Katrina EPA's Current and Future Environmental protection Efforts Could Be Enhanced by Addressing Issues and Challenges Faced on the Gulf Coast, criticizing EPA's handling of contamination in post-Katrina New Orleans in the Gulf Coast (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2007). The GAO found inadequate monitoring for asbestos around demolition and renovation sites. Additionally, the GAO investigation revealed that "key information released to the public about environmental contamination was neither timely nor adequate, and in some cases, easily misinterpreted to the public's detriment."

The GAO also found that EPA did not make clear until eight months later, in August 2006, that a major finding in its 2005 report--that the great majority of the data showed that adverse health effects would not be expected from exposure to sediments from previously flooded areas--applied only to short-term visits, such as to view damage to homes (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2007).

You have to feel sorry even for Governor Bobby Jindal, who faces the horrifying prospect of the government counting disaster aid against the state as income for the federal Medicaid calculator. But not that sorry, since by all accounts Jindal would cut assistance no matter what.

The point being, if Chin can go to the Congress and find assistance—and in fact it seems that he actually expects more in the way of a response from the executive branch, from groups like EPA, CDC, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—the project will have a very significant impact on New Orleans.

Posted by Kriston at April 21, 2009 1:49 PM